Age of Mythology

I really need help. When I get to the first Egypt part, I always lose. Please help me, Games Guru!!!!!

Games Guru: I generally need more specifics before I can tell you what you are doing wrong. That being the case — and seeing that it has been five years since I have played this game — I will try to give you some general advice. (I am sure I will get some names wrong. As I say, it’s been five years.)

In Age of Mythology, you generally start with a town center, a few soldiers and a few workers. You may have food enough to create a few more workers or soldiers and maybe enough wood to construct a building or two. The trick to this game, and all real-time strategy games, is to get your society up and running quickly.

I once played the number two player in the world at Age of Empires. (If you are wondering, he crushed me in a matter of minutes. His trick? He could level up from Stone Age to Iron Age in 11 minutes.) I am not one of the world’s great RTS players, but I have seen some play.

So here we go. Say you have three workers and a soldier with enough food for two more workers or another soldier or two. Immediately set the town center to creating a new worker, then send your workers to gather food at the nearest source — generally berries.

When that new worker comes out, have him build a house, then start gathering more food. You need houses because the game will limit the size of your population until you have enough houses. Start the town center on your next worker. When he comes out, have him start gathering wood. By this time, your workers will have gathered enough food for another worker. Create him and send him out for food.

The goal is to have seven guys collecting food and three guys collecting wood so that you can build two buildings quickly and move up to the next age. Also, as you grow your population, be sure to build two more houses.

What two buildings should you go for? I generally like one military building and a granary. If wood is too far away or you find yourself hunting animals for food, a storage pit will work.

Once you reach the next age, it is time to build one or two workers whom you can send to explore the map. Send them on long trips to every corner of the map so that you can discover oases with food, gold and good fishing spots, as well as your enemies’ location.

In the meantime, as early as possible, you need to start developing your military as the second age. You will want archers and foot soldiers, but you also need to increase your work force. You need to expand into farming (meaning you will need a marketplace along with a granary) or fishing. Given a choice, I generally prefer fishing as my method of gathering food — assuming there are enough ties on the map to sustain a good fishing fleet.

You will want to build through to the next age quickly. During the second age, I generally like to have one worker assigned to constructing houses and other buildings, and 20 workers gathering food and wood. Because of the importance of the gods in this game, you will also want to start gathering gold in this age.

Do not neglect your military. Once you reach this age, build it up as well. If the workers you sent to explore the map locate your enemies, you might send packs of soldiers out to see if you can catch them off guard. Level up to the third age once you have the buildings, gold and food. Here you need to make decisions. Do you want to rely on military strength? Do you want heroes? Do you want to specialize in priests? You take over from here … and good luck.

If you use a pack of about 10 or 20 preists (100 gold each), they will be able to defeat any myth units your enemy can throw at you 9especially when they heal each other, I forget what god that is) and are okay against medium-sized regiments of human soldiers. In the seguel (Titans) build them whenever you can, and you can hold off Titans for far longer than human soldiers.